The F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter is designed to defeat threats that will have been superceded well before this aircraft enters operational service. The performance of the F-35 is suffering seriously from the conflicting design requirements that it was intended to meet. As a result, the F-35 is shaping up to be a technological failure, a delivery schedule and ‘affordability’ failure, and a techno-strategic failure. This will place Britain in the position of having to look at replacement options, which are extremely limited in view of developing threat capabilities. The question that must inevitably arise is: ‘Should Britain Ask the United States for the F-22?’
About a decade ago the F-22A Raptor was proposed as an alternative to the domestically built Eurofighter Typhoon. Britain’s influential aerospace industry lobby killed that proposal, rubbishing the F-22 with some very dubious DERA JOUST simulations, which claimed the Typhoon was 81 percent as good as an F-22. Forensic analysis showed this was nonsense, an assessment since then borne out by the operational experience of the US Air Force flying the F-22 against a range of conventional fighters.
the JOUST irrelevant?
The only new fighter in the UK inventory is the Typhoon F.2, which is technologically comparable to currently built American F-15 and F/A-18E/F fighters. While more agile than these legacy US fighters, it is equally vulnerable to advanced SA-20/21/23 Surface to Air Missile systems, and new generation Su-35BM class Flanker variants.
the typhoon a 4th gen fighter?
:p
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February 25, 2009 at 10:28 am